All posts tagged Executions

Chinese cyberspace Wednesday was popping with a basic question: What’s different about a kebab vendor named Xia Junfeng and Gu Kailai, the wife of once-powerful Chinese politician Bo Xilai and the daughter of a celebrated revolutionary?

Though Ms. Gu hails from China’s elite and Mr. Xia from the nation’s masses of laobaixing, both are murderers, according to Chinese courts. Each expressed remorse and cited self-defense to explain their graven acts. And in both cases, courts ruled that death is the appropriate penalty.

But to many on the Internet in China, their differences came into starker view on Wednesday when Mr. Xia’s wife began writing chilling messages that suggested the end was near for her husband. Read More »

• Another day of choppy trade saw the Shanghai Composite index close up 1.8% at 2967.59, leading shares across Asia higher.

• President Hu Jintao made his first trip to Xinjiang since last month’s deadly rioting, where he emphasized the importance of maintaining stability and warned separatists that they are “doomed to fail.” Read More »

On Tuesday, China launched a pilot program for organ donations in 10 provinces and cities. The measures may reduce reliance on the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners, a practice that is widely criticized by human rights groups.

The new organ donation program is a joint project between the Red Cross Society of China and the Ministry of Health. The areas chosen for the pilot program include five provinces (Liaoning, Zhejiang, Shandong, Guangdong and Jiangxi) and five cities (Tianjin, Shanghai, Xiamen, Nanjing and Wuhan), according to Xinhua.

The agencies said they would establish an organ donor registry and a system for distribution of organs, while also making efforts to promote the concept of organ donation among the people. According to official estimates cited by Xinhua, as many as 1.5 million Chinese require organ transplants each year, but only 10,000 operations are performed due to a shortage of donors.

It’s not clear whether the above figures include illegal transplants, a practice that has led to the development of what is known as “transplant tourism” in which desperate foreigners travel to China to buy new organs. At the right price, few questions are asked. Read More »

• Chinese shares ended the week down sharply. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed down 2.9% on Friday at 3260.69 and dropped by 4.4% this week, after rising for seven consecutive weeks of rising. A senior official in the National Development and Reform Commission said no changes are planned in China’s macro-economic policy.

• The investment arm of China’s sovereign wealth fund posted a negative 2.1% return last year, but said it still outperformed many of its other global counterparts.

• Alibaba.com will launch a $30 million marketing campaign in the U.S. next week, aimed at introducing American businesses to the company’s English-language site. Read More »

Don’t call it a homecoming, yet, but China’s most wanted fugitive is apparently longing for a return to the motherland.

In a widely reprinted interview in this week’s China Business View, Lai Changxing, who fled China for Canada after being accused of running a multibillion-dollar smuggling operation, said he misses his hometown and hopes to return to China someday.

“Even though my life in Canada is ‘okay,’ I always think about returning, because ultimately that’s my home,” he said, according to the interview transcript (in Chinese here).

Lai has been on the lam for ten years, ever since his Yuanhua business empire unraveled amid allegations of massive corruption. The scandal shook Fujian province, where Yuanhua was based, and resulted in the downfall of several high-ranking officials and the arrests of hundreds of others.

In the interview, Lai acknowledged a tax evasion charge, one of the several leveled against him, chalking it up as a normal part of doing business in China. “I was just someone doing business, there’s tax evasion there, I was just trying to make a little more money while doing business,” he said. Read More »

• Chinese stocks fell Thursday. The Shanghai Composite closed down 2.1% at 3,356.33, following the release of the central bank’s quarterly monetary-policy report, which restated its easy-credit stance but left the door open to “fine-tuning with market tools.”

• A Hong Kong court froze the assets of GOME founder Huang Guangyu upon the request of the city’s securities regulator. Huang was detained by police in mainland China last fall for alleged economic crimes, though no specific charges have been brought against him.

• Prosecutors in Guangzhou are alleging that Wang Sheng, former chairman of property developer Canton Properties, received 4.8 billion yuan (around $700 million) in illegal loans from the state-controlled Bank of Communications, in what would be China’s biggest case of bank fraud to date. Read More »

Japan hanged three murderers on Tuesday, including one Chinese citizen, according to the Japanese Department of Justice. That would be the first Chinese national to be executed in Japan in modern times, according to news portal NetEase.com.

Chen Detong, 41 years old, was executed on Tuesday in Tokyo for killing three Chinese people and injuring another three in the Japanese city of Kawasaki in 1999. According to Chinese Business View, Chen sneaked into Japan illegally in the 1990s from Southern China’s Fujian Province. He stayed with a distant relative in Kawasaki and shared apartments with another five who also came from China. Chen was allegedly violently mistreated by his flatmates and was later driven out of the apartment by them.

In May 1999, Chen, then a leader of “Green Dragon,” came back for revenge. The report also said that Chen and his gang group were also found guilty of 25 other crimes including murder, rape and robbery in this area since October 1998.

Chen was sentenced to death in 2001. In 2006, the Japanese Supreme Court finalized his death penalty. When being kept in prison, Chen expressed his wish to go back to China, according to Chinese Business View. Read More »

• China stocks dropped 5% in a volatile trading day that erased most of the gains of the past five trading days. The drop came amid concerns that China’s loose bank lending could slow as the economy returns and policy makers worry about the potential for bubbles in assets like stocks and properties. That didn’t stop shares of China State Construction Engineering Corp. from jumping as much as 70% in the first day of trading and ending 56% higher for what was the world’s largest initial public offering of the year.

• China expressed concerns about U.S. debt levels in high-level talks in Washington, as Chinese policy makers worry that a lack of fiscal discipline could hurt their nation’s vast holdings of dollar-denominated instruments…. Read More »

Authorities in Xinjiang said they are planning to provide free lawyers for all suspects brought to trial in connection with the recent violence in Urumqi.

In an act of apparent cultural sensitivity, Xinjiang’s department of justice will select dozens of Uighur lawyers from local law firms and provide them with short training courses on criminal defense, the Global Times reports. Presumably, the Uighur lawyers would represent Uighur defendants who were involved in the July 5 protests that broke out into riots, leaving at least 197 dead and more than 1,000 injured. According to official reports, most of the dead came from the Han Chinese majority.

But the mere act of providing legal aid may also portend serious punishment for defendants. The Global Times noted that under Chinese criminal law, free legal counsel may be provided to defendants who are minors, mentally handicapped, or facing the death penalty. Soon after the rioting, the Communist Party chief of Urumqi said the government would seek executions for anyone found to be behind the nearly 200 deaths.

Local justice officials are soon expected to approve the arrests of suspects involved in the Urumqi riots, with the first batch of trials completed in time for sentences to be handed down on Oct. 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Read More »

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